MISSING OUT: Absences

When he started coughing up blood, junior Ian Martin knew something was wrong. Martin had to trade a seat in the classroom for a hospital bed. The medical scare and other unexcused absences caused the junior to very quickly accumulate 39 owed hours earlier this fall.

“Missing has really affected my grades,” Martin said. “I’m still catching up. It’s been really hard, I’ve never had this bad of grades in my life and my rank is going to be affected by this.”

The balance between school and absences is a battle students face constantly. Between getting sick and skipping, missing school affects both the student academically and the school financially.

“I do believe school is important of course and by not coming you really miss out on a lot,” principal John Graham said. “Not only does it impact learning but absences impact our funding as well.”

Students who rack up too many unexcused absences can receive a court notice. Luckily for truant students, the law recently changed with House Bill 2398, passed by the Texas Legislature this summer and signed by Governor Greg Abbott. The new law, which went into effect Sept. 1, was an effort to help prevent students from starting off with a criminal record. Now, jail time is no longer an option for truancy. Students can be charged with a civil offense for too many absences instead of receiving a Class C misdemeanor.

“We don’t take a lot of students through the court system and so there were a lot of school districts neglecting that system and using it for the wrong reasons,” Graham said. “But we never went down those paths. I would say as a district we use a very good job of not abusing the system.”

But the system is easy to abuse. Students often skip because they know they can make up only a fraction of the hours. For every four classes a student misses of the same period, they receive one make-up hour. Students can then make up the hour with any teacher and submit signed paperwork to be removed from the hours owed list.
“I’m passing all my classes and get good grades so if I make up my hours then I’m good,” senior Izzy Lopez said. “Skipping relieves my stress. I only will skip if we
aren’t doing anything in class and I’m not missing anything, but I never skip on test days.”

Missing school doesn’t only hurt the student’s academic success. The school is also dramatically affected by students missing from their seats. Because Texas schools are funded based on daily attendance, missing only a single student for one day costs the school about $43 in state funding.

“As a school, it impacts our funding,” Graham said. “As you know the state has cut back on our funding over the years, and we have less money which impacts students in the classroom, like having larger class sizes, less textbooks and resources, and offering less classes.”

During the school’s 2014-2015 school year, 21,802 students were absent throughout the year, costing the school an estimated $937,486 in funding, all because of absences.

“When the district tells me this is how much money we lose for attendance, I always think about the loss of teachers,” Graham said. “I know that if I have this much more money in my budget then I could hiring more teachers.”

According to the 2015-2016 Leander ISD Attendance Campaign, it is estimated that Central Texas students are absent 2.4 million days of school each year and that 7.5 million US students miss a month of school each year. The campaign also shows statistically that on average, a student with a high school education will make a million dollars more than a dropout over a single lifetime.

“We want to go through every step possible to get the student to come to school,” Graham said.  “We look at things like New Hope and online stuff to help people who have reached hours owed like 300. We also have students that have illnesses that is out of their control so we have other things in place for students that get to that place.”

Health issues can have a huge impact on absences, hours owed and catching up on school work. Senior Rebecca Neilson missed roughly half of last school year because she was diagnosed with a serious illness. While the school excused 50 percent of her absences, she still had to make up the rest.

“It sucks because I didn’t choose to get sick and be absent, but I get why they [only excused 50 percent] because there has to be some kind of accountability or else everyone who is absent would just say they were sick,” Neilson said.

This year, the school had 96.6 percent of students attend in the first six weeks. While a 3.4 percentage for absences might seem small, it translates to an average of 83 students a day, which costs the school more than $3,500 per day.

But the biggest losses come from days when students miss in massive numbers. Last May, 432 students were absent the Monday after prom, the day seniors usually skip. That cost the school $18,576 for that day alone. The final day of school, which hundreds of students skipped since they were exempt or not taking a final, cost $29,197.

“I see a lot of absences on days like senior skip day and days following student holidays or before them,” attendance clerk Shelly Davis said. “It doesn’t seem like much but when you factor in senior skip day, you talk about several hundred kids missing one day and it really adds up.”